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The opera La Juive by Fromental Halévy was first performed in Paris in 1835. It rapidly became a worldwide success, and was performed – and discussed – all over Europe within a few years of the Parisian premiere. La Juive was first performed in Stockholm 1866. This chapter deals with especially the press reactions to the first performance. The case of the reception of Halévy’s La Juive is a good example of the complex interaction and mobility of ideas, aesthetics, musical works, performers, performance practices, vocal and instrumental techniques, but also in acting, direction, production and scene techniques during the period.

10.

Ander, Owe

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

The Coming Woman: Representations of Female Suffrage in Two Swedish Books for Girls

This article explores depictions of female suffrage and the women’s movement in two stories published for girls: Cecilia Milow’s ”Han eller hon?” (1892, Him or Her?) and Hedvig Svedenborg’s Hannas dagbok (1921, Hanna’s Diary). My aim is to analyze how representatives of the women’s movement are portrayed in the texts and how meeting these women affects the character development of the protagonist.

The article shows that both narratives associate the women’s movement with modernity. In Milow’s text, the main character has to find a balance between a modern, exaggerated version of female liberation and misogynist views of women’s subordination. Svedenborg’s novel, on the other hand, contrasts different types of female modernity and emancipation, giving priority to women who combine traditionally feminine values with political work as ”mothers of society”. Despite their ideological differences, both texts address the girl reader as a future political subject by incorporating explicit discussions of women’s rights in books for girls.

The aim of this article is to analyze depictions of gender and sexuality in sex education books for young children published in Sweden between 1965 and 2014. After describing the general trends in the publication of sex education literature during the period, the article discusses the narrative address and family structures, gendered descriptions of reproduction, and the introduction of assisted reproductive technologies and non-heterosexual parenting in the studied material. The majority of the sex education books portray white, two-parent families and focus on heterosexual reproduction. Men and sperm are normally described as more active and important during conception, and the reproductive process is often depicted from the sperm’s point of view. At the same time, there are books throughout the period that problematize gender stereotypes in reproduction and, from the late 1990s, heteronormative sexuality. This article also shows that verbal and visual descriptions of sexual intercourse were more explicit in sex education books from the 1970s, while books from the early 21th century depict a greater variety of families and assisted reproductive technologies. After the 1970s, sex education literature for all ages disappears and the books are more clearly adapted for different age groups.

25.

Andersson, Maria

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

In a Time of Democratization. Gender and Conservativism in Carl Sundbeck’s Elsa i Upsala

This article examines notions of gender and how they are utilized in criticism of the process of democratization in contemporary Sweden in Carl Sundbeck’s Elsa i Upsala (1897). The aim is to analyze how a girl protagonist becomes the means to visualizing and processing changes in the status of women in the 19th century. Gender and nationalism in Sundbeck’s narrative are discussed through an analysis of genre, the female narrator, processes of development and maturation, and male and female spheres.Elsa i Upsala is a hybrid of a girl’s book and an academic novel. The mix of genres reflects the gender transgressions of a modern life style which result in a weakening of the nation. The naïve girl narrator formulates criticism of modernity but she also functions as a positive counter-type to the emancipated female university students and their deformed femininity.

This dissertation investigates the way that feminist resistance is expressed in two Swedish and two German so-called New Woman novels from the turn of the twentieth century: Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet (1910, Penwoman), Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie (1895, From a Good Family), Hilma Angered-Strandberg’s Lydia Vik (1904), and Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen (1911).

The theoretical apparatus is comprised by the work of Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Jacques Lacan, and Jessica Benjamin. By introducing a psychoanalytic and feminist perspective, this dissertation seeks to develop the possibilities for agency and resistance within the framework of Foucault’s theories. It investigates four textual and contextually grounded strategies of resistance that are prominent in these novels: individuality, openness, desire, and eugenics.

This study demonstrates how Gabriele Reuter, Grete Meisel-Hess, and Hilma Angered-Strandberg, inspired by the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche and Ellen Key, depict feminine individuality in relation to a scientific and philosophical discourse that specifically denied women individuality. The authors anchor individuality in a corporality that was similarly denied to women by a bourgeois and dogmatic Christian discourse.

Openness and wit function as resistance strategies in Elin Wägner’s Pennskaftet. Humorous rejoinders and narrative comments can disarm a conservative. An open attitude towards the emancipation project could also help to resolve the conflicts between different feminist positions and between different women.

Desire functions as an important resistance strategy in each of the novels examined. It is variously represented as a vital instinct, a desire for knowledge, and a sexual desire, as in Gabriele Reuter’s Aus guter Familie – or as a desire for suffrage, as in Pennskaftet, or for maternity legislation, as in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen. By formulating a notion of feminine desire, turn-of-the-century feminists were able both to seize control of sexuality from the church and to wrest morality from the grasp of the bourgeoisie. These resistance strategies could also have a biopolitical character: in Grete Meisel-Hess’s Die Intellektuellen, woman is placed at the service of humanity on eugenicist grounds, and her good qualities are seen as capable of promoting humanity’s progress.

This dissertation shows that in these novels desire at the individual level serves to reinforce feminine subjectivity. Love is seen as associated with an intensified sense of life and as a precondition of creativity. At the social level, desire also functions as the basis for a feeling of solidarity among women that instils in them courage and an urge to persevere in the suffrage struggle, this latter a highly protracted process. In this way desire acquires political potential.

A framing chapter on context provides the intellectual and philosophical backgrounds of the various strategies of resistance. It is followed by four analytical chapters, each of which addresses one novel.

The contribution investigates culinary transitions between Sweden and Europe in Torgny Lindgren's and Ella Nilsson's epistolary cookbook, Maten. Hunger och törst i Västerbotten (2003) (Food: Hunger and Thirst in Västerbotten). With a theoretical starting point in discourse-analytic approaches to nationalistic ideology, primarily elaborated within cultural studies, the contribution examines uses of the binarity of Sweden/Europe in essentialist and deconstructive practices of the cookbook. The argument comprises three parts. In the first part, the cookbook's conception of Västerbottenian cuisine is scrutinized. It is argued that Lindgren's and Nilsson's construction of gastronomic Västerbottenianness brings into play a whole range of rhetorical strategies that are usually utilized to construct national cuisines. Västerbottenian cookery is: (a) codified as a normative canon, (b) connected to a specific place, to a historical tradition and to ritualized customs, (c) defined as a restitution project preserving regional heritage from entropy, and (d) organized according to certain culinary icons, each of which mythologically incarnates some part of the "soul" of the region. The second part discusses the position of Europe on the cookbook's gastronomic map. The concept of Europeanness in Maten is shown to be constructed as a cultural "Other" and – by analogy with other counter-images – (a) excluded from the field of genuine cookery, (b) smuggled into the cookbook's culinary discourse through devices of disguise and (c) manifest in "typical" Västerbottnian recipes its presence in "typical" Västerbottenian recipes by generating contradictions, semantic displacements and aporetic paradoxes. The final part examines the role of Sweden among the cookbook's gastronomic identities. Unlike traditional cookery books dedicated to Swedish national cuisine, Maten problematizes the relationship between centre and periphery, constructing Swedishness as a "double" identity: both the internalized "Self" and the oppressive "Other". Correspondingly, Lindgren and Nilsson have an ambiguous, partly ironic, attitude towards their own local patriotic cuisine project using the notion of "Saminess" to undermine Västerbottenian culinary logocentrism.

45.

Bak, Krzysztof

Stockholm University, Faculty of Humanities, Department of Culture and Aesthetics.

The article investigates the complex intertextual dialogue between Torgny Lindgren's Minnen (2010) and Augustine's Confessions, from which Lindgren has taken the motto of his autobiography. By using the patristic intertext as a starting point, the investigation intends to show how Lindgren has constructed his image of Västerbotten. The article is divided into four parts. The first part (I), establishes the heuristic principles of the investigation, which adhere to the recent tendency in patristic studies to observe the heterogeneous character of Augustine's world of thought. The second part of the article (II) charts parallels between text and intertext in their portrayal of grace, evil, and man. It emerges that those elements of Lindgren's world view which are particularly closely related to Augustinian theology are also the ones that possess a particularly strong Västerbottnian character. This intertextual affinity can be explained not only with reference to the Lutheran tradition of Västerbotten, but also has to be related to the text's specific structure of memoria, which is unravelled in the remaining parts (III-IV). On the basis of modern cultural anthropological theories of memory, the third part demonstrates that most of the differences between text and intertext can be linked to the cultural memory of modernity, and document the rise and fall of industrial subjectivity. Lindgren embeds his autobiographical version of Västerbotten into the basic structure of modern memory, transforms it into a quasi-subject, and taints it with the symptoms of decay that plague the industrial 'I.' In the same as Western modernity, Minnen draws the majority of its metaphors of dissolution from Augustine's paradigmatic doctrine of sin. The fourth part of the article (IV) aims to analyse the autobiography's mechanisms of substitution. It is argued that these attempt-in analogy to many Western critics of modernity-to counteract the crisis of industrial cultural memory by reviving the Augustinian forms of memoria and creating a synthesis of pre-industrial and industrial. Within the quasi subject of Västerbotten and its wealth of agrarian objects, Lindgren finds adequate metaphorical models for use in his compensatory project of counter-memory. The article concludes by observing that, just as Minnen's productive dialogue with Augustine allows it to recapitulate the history of Western memory, Lindgren's Västerbotten is elevated to the status of a universal symbol of European consciousness and its fate.